Correct Physical Review style fro arXiv references

[NovemberZulu]

Right now references to arXiv publications look like "authors, Title (2013)", while it should be something like "authors, arXiv:1204.1234.", see http://publish.aps.org/authors/references-physical-review-physical-review-letters

[rmzelle]

The main problem is that CSL currently doesn't have a good way to store arXiv IDs.

[NovemberZulu]

Zotero seems to store arXiv IDs in "Report Number" field, so the data itself should be there.

[rmzelle]

That unfortunately doesn't really help us much. The "Report Number" field could also contain very different information (like, an actual report number), which would have to be treated differently.

It would be possible to create a custom style that relies on the "Report Number" field to correctly format arXiv publications, but we prefer not have styles in the repository that rely on this kind of hacks. (ideally we would have an unambiguous way to store the arXiv identifier, but we've been rather hesitant to add more identifier variables)

[NovemberZulu]

As far as I understand, the problem is to identify arXiv records in a reliable and "clean" way, is it right?

[rmzelle]

Yes.

We could add an arxiv variable to CSL (and a corresponding "arXiv" field to Zotero), but there are many more identifiers in use, and we were hoping we could come up with a solution that would give us more flexibility and allow arbitrary identifiers to be stored and used in CSL styles.

[NovemberZulu]

I see. Two possible solutions are (i) adding "arxiv" record type (may be a subtype of "report" type?); (ii) checking if "report-type" is "arXiv e-print" and changing the output accordingly. Neither seems to be appealing, imho. The first one requires too fundamental changes and risks introducing incompatibility, the second one is just a hack.

[adam3smith]

I think we'd somehow want to be able to use arXiv ID as a variable (we
could then check for its existence to identify an arXiv record. We already
have PMID and PMCID.
But we'd probably have that discussion either on xbiblio or at a new issue
on https://github.com/ajlyon/zotero-bits/issues?state=open

On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 10:56 AM, NovemberZulu notifications@github.comwrote:

I see. Two possible solutions are (i) adding "arxiv" record type (may be a
subtype of "report" type?); (ii) checking if "report-type" is "arXiv
e-print" and changing the output accordingly. Neither seems to be
appealing, imho. The first one requires too fundamental changes and risks
introducing incompatibility, the second one is just a hack.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/754#issuecomment-29309821
.

Sebastian Karcher
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Political Science
Northwestern University

[rmzelle]

We might also want to investigate a dedicated preprint item type?

[rmzelle]

(I'm not completely convinced that it makes sense to treat preprints differently from regularly articles. E.g. PeerJ now has their own preprint service, and suggests to cite those preprints as

Darling ES, Shiffman D, Côté IM, Drew JA. (2013) The role of Twitter in the life cycle of a scientific publication. PeerJ PrePrints 1:e16v1 http://dx.doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.16v1

See https://peerj.com/preprints/16/ and https://peerj.com/about/preprints/what-is-a-preprint/)

[adam3smith]

Closing this. The issue isn't resolved, but as per above, this is a more general question, better treated on xbiblio or the like once we think about identifiers in general.